Tripo: Import Model

Here's the thing nobody tells you about the Tripo nodes: they only ever talk to other Tripo nodes. Every generation hands back a task ID, and the post-processing steps - Texture, Rig, Convert - insist on that ID. So what do you do when you already have a model? A local mesh you sculpted, a file from Rodin or Hunyuan3D, something you've had sitting around for years?

Tripo: Import Model is the door in. It takes an external 3D file, uploads it to Tripo, and returns a MODEL_TASK_ID - which is exactly the ticket you need to feed Tripo: Texture model, Tripo: Rig model, or Tripo: Convert model. One input, one output, and it's the one node in the entire partner/3d family that's free. The price badge literally says so. That's not an accident - Tripo would rather have your model inside their ecosystem than not at all.

What it accepts

• model_3d - GLB, FBX, OBJ, or STL, up to 150 MB.

The format choice is where the real advice lives. Use GLB. Textures survive import only when they're embedded in the file, and GLB is the format that reliably carries them. OBJ and STL carry no embedded textures at all - you'll import a perfectly good mesh and then wonder where your colors went. A couple of hard rejections are baked into the node too: GLTF (the non-binary .gltf flavor) is refused outright because it references external files, and anything over 150 MB gets bounced.

Where it slots into a workflow

Wire it from the built-in Load 3D & Animation node (for a file on disk) or straight from another partner node's file output - the schema explicitly names Rodin and Hunyuan3D as sources. The output task_id then chains into any Tripo post-processing node just like a freshly generated model would. It's the bridge between "I made this somewhere else" and "Tripo's cloud does my rigging/texturing."

The gotcha that trips everyone

Texturing an imported model is different from texturing a generated one. When Tripo generates from an image, it has that source image to infer colors from. An imported model has no source image, so the texturing step will flounder unless you supply a texture_prompt describing what the surface should look like - the Tripo: Texture model node's own tooltip calls it "required in practice" for imports. So: import a clean GLB, then be ready to describe your material out loud.

The honest take: it's a small, unglamorous node, but it's the piece that turns the whole Tripo suite from a closed loop into a tool you can actually point at your own assets. And it's free, which is a first for this corner of ComfyUI.